"Disheartening" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... when the little party commenced to resaddle their ponies and in the midst of their labors there came a rude and disheartening interruption. Billy had kept either the Chinaman or Bridge constantly upon watch toward the direction in which Rozales' men lolled smoking in the dark, and it was the crack of Bridge's carbine which awoke the Americans to the fact that though the border lay but a few ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... producing a discouraging and disheartening effect upon Margaret's mind, only served to arouse her to new vigor and determination. She had been somewhat timid and fearful in the earlier part of her troubles, when she had only a husband to think of and to care ...
— Margaret of Anjou - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... it entirely reversed the reason for optimism. And the instant the reversal was made it felt like the abrupt ease when a bone is put back in the socket. I had often called myself an optimist, to avoid the too evident blasphemy of pessimism. But all the optimism of the age had been false and disheartening for this reason, that it had always been trying to prove that we fit in to the world. The Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do NOT fit in to the world. I had tried to be happy by telling myself that man is an animal, like any other which sought its meat from God. But now I really ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... doggedly, breathing heavily, more with excitement than with labor, for it seemed that we were approaching the moon,—so bleak and high the roadway ran. I had miscalculated sadly. It had looked only a couple of hours' brisk walk from the hotel, but the way lengthened out toward the last in a most disheartening fashion. ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... woods, as though determined to charge, but invariably veering off to right or left as they came within three hundred yards. Of course, there was no direction from which the bullets did not come whizzing into the timber, and men were more likely to be hit in the back than elsewhere,—one of the many disheartening features of such warfare. Almost every moment somebody was hit, though at the time it could not be seen or known, as all were too busy with what was in their front to look around. Once in a while, too, ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... This was somewhat disheartening, but of course he could not expect success at once. He must keep up a stout heart, so on he walked. It was a fine clear morning, but the air seemed to him heavy with bad odors, and he had never seen such filth ...
— Harper's Young People, January 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... the fifteen from our plantation, one boy of about my age was struck by a parrot shell while climbing from the boat into the fort. We were told of the perils we were to meet, both before and after we reached our destination. For one of the most disheartening things was the sad report of the survivors of those whose places we were to fill. As the rowboats left them on John's island wharf and as we were about to embark they told us of the great danger to which we would be exposed,—of the ...
— My Life In The South • Jacob Stroyer
... unpleasing, displeasing; disagreeable, unpalatable, bitter, distasteful; uninviting; unwelcome; undesirable, undesired; obnoxious; unacceptable, unpopular, thankless. unsatisfactory, untoward, unlucky, uncomfortable. distressing; afflicting, afflictive; joyless, cheerless, comfortless; dismal, disheartening; depressing, depressive; dreary, melancholy, grievous, piteous; woeful, rueful, mournful, deplorable, pitiable, lamentable; sad, affecting, touching, pathetic. irritating, provoking, stinging, annoying, aggravating, mortifying, galling; unaccommodating, invidious, vexatious; troublesome, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... get rich. Now clapboards and sassafras, pitch, tar, and pine trees for masts, were making no fortune for Virginia shippers. How could they, these few folk far off in America, compete in products of the forest with northern Europe? As to mines of gold and silver, that first rich vision had proved a disheartening mirage. "They have great hopes that the mountains are very rich, from the discovery of a silver mine made nineteen years ago, at a place about four days' journey from the falls of James river; but they have not the means of transporting the ore." So, dissatisfied with some means ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... We found a disheartening number of fine old houses, located just wrong. There was a splendid, two-story brick house with hall running through the middle. But it stood in the commercial section of a village, its door steps flush with the sidewalk, and was hemmed in on one side by a gas ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... over his disheartening Environments and limitations, till, At last, well knowing that the outside world Would yield him favors never found at home, He rose determinedly one July dawn— Even before the call for breakfast—and, Climbing the alley-fence, and bitterly Shaking his clenched fist at the ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... title applies so well, while, on the other hand, it certainly fits this play quite as well as the one it now bears. The whole play is emphatically love's labour: its main interest throughout turns on the unwearied and finally-successful struggles of affection against the most stubborn and disheartening obstacles. It may indeed be urged that the play entitled Love's Labour's Won has been lost; but this, considering what esteem the Poet's works were held in, both in his time and ever since, is so very improbable as to be hardly worth dwelling upon. There was far more ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... but I have had charge of a watch in my time, old and rusty as I seem, nor have I spent so many long nights on deck without keeping thoughts at work, though I may not have overhaul'd as much philosophy, in so doing, as a paid parish priest, or a fee'd lawyer. Let me tell you, it is a disheartening thing to be nothing but a dweller in a colony. It keeps down the pride and spirit of a man, and lends a hand in making him what his masters would be glad to have him. I shall say nothing of fruits, and meats, and other eatables, that come from the land of which both ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... incomprehensible manner. It made its way into the cabin, into the forecastle; it poisoned the sheltered places on the deck, it could be sniffed as high as the main-yard. It was clear that if the smoke came out the air came in. This was disheartening. This combustion refused to ...
— Youth • Joseph Conrad
... report to spread that all the members of the corrupt camarilla which had surrounded him were to be arrested, but the President soon publicly disclaimed any intention of doing so,— which appears to have been a fatal mistake. It is disheartening to have to state that nearly all the Allied Legations in Peking had been in intimate relations with this gang—always excepting the American Legation whose attitude is uniformly correct—the French Minister going so far as to entertain the Military Governors and ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... This most disheartening record underwent a complete change in 1576, when the son of the Bungo feudatory, a youth of some sixteen years, and, two years later, the feudatory himself, Otomo, embraced the Christian faith. In the first Annual Letter sent to Rome after these events a striking admission is made: "It is ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... quick rolling motion just as it was being drawn taut. The result was as surprising as it was sudden. The animal's four feet were snipped from under it neatly, sending the broncho to earth with a disheartening bump. ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Texas - Or, The Veiled Riddle of the Plains • Frank Gee Patchin
... It must have been disheartening work, picking away at the flinty ledges. There is no further mention of the "Dashaway," but we hear of the "Flyaway," the "Annipolitan," the "Live Yankee," and of many another, each of which holds out a beacon of hope for a brief moment, then ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... had carried them out I would probably have been cut off by the enemy. My burghers were also getting restless, and asked me why, while all the other commandos were retiring, we did not move. Cronje's surrender had had a most disheartening effect on them; there was, in fact, quite a panic among them. I mounted a high kopje from which I could see the whole Orange Free State army, followed by a long line of quite 500 carts and a lot of cattle, in full retreat, and enveloped in great clouds of red dust. ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... boom upon their ears; duller and duller at each successive detonation, which tells that the distance between them and the frigate, instead of diminishing, increases. However sad and disheartening, they cannot help it. They dare not put the barque about, or in any way alter her course. They must keep scudding on, though they may never see ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... grass-plots or smoothly shorn lawns, which hospitably invite the imagination into the sweet domestic interiors of English life. Everything, however sunny and luxuriant may be the scene around, is especially disheartening in the immediate neighborhood of ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Strength and Force, whose threats serve only to excite a useless compassion in Vulcan, who is nevertheless forced to carry them into execution; then his solitary complainings, the arrival of the womanly tender ocean nymphs, whose kind but disheartening sympathy stimulates him to give freer vent to his feelings, to relate the causes of his fall, and to reveal the future, though with prudent reserve he reveals it only in part; the visit of the ancient Oceanus, a kindred god of the Titanian ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... last?" asked Slagg of the old woman, in a low voice, for he had been taught, or had learned intuitively, that few things are more disheartening in a ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... 2 or 3 miles in a S.W. (?) direction under sail by alternately throwing her aback, then filling sail and pressing through the narrow leads; probably this will scarcely make up for our drift. It's all very disheartening. The bright side is that everyone is prepared to exert himself to the utmost—however poor the result ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... Mrs. Caldwell, in manifest surprise, "you beat me out! I can't understand it. Here you are, under circumstances that I should call of a most distressing and disheartening nature, almost as cheerful as if nothing had happened. I expected to find you overwhelmed with trouble, but, instead, you are almost as tranquil ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... wish to be known, or because they have heard that money is easily made in that way, or because they think they will chance that among a number of other things. The ignorance of technique which they often show is not nearly so disheartening as the palpable factitiousness of their product. It is something that they have made; it is not anything that has grown ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... occasions, ladle out suggestions to his skipper. Thus, in time, he had acquired a reputation for being unreliable and a wind-bag, with the result that skippers were chary of engaging him. Not to be too prolix, at the time Captain Scraggs made the disheartening discovery that he had to have a skipper for the Maggie, Mr. Gibney found himself reduced to the alternative of longshore work or a fo'castle berth in a windjammer ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... Besides, we must not take ourselves too seriously. We were amateurs, not experts in coast defence, and on such vague grounds to fastidiously reject a clue which went so far as this one was to quarrel with our luck. There was a disheartening corollary to this latter argument that in my new-born zeal I shut my eyes to. As amateurs, were we capable of using our clue and gaining exact knowledge of the defences in question? Davies, I knew, felt this strongly, ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... the back door he opened it and stepped inside. Of all the barren places of crude, disheartening ugliness the Harvester ever had seen, ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... The unsettled and disheartening times disturbed all the relations of artists. There is but little record of Cherubini for several years. A significant passage in a letter written in 1814, speaking of several military marches written for a Prussian band, indicates the occupation of Paris by ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... disheartening work learning a musical instrument. You would think that Society, for its own sake, would do all it could to assist a man to acquire the art of playing a musical ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... by a Spanish soldier, the banner of the Moslems was replaced by the flag of the Cross, the head of Ali on a pike being exhibited in derision above it. The conquerors seem to have seen no incongruity in this performance. The lowering of the sacred standard of the Capitan-Basha had a disheartening effect upon the Turks; they knew by this that their Commander-in-Chief was dead and his ship captured, the result being that the resistance of the Ottomans began to weaken. Then thirty galleys took to flight from the neighbourhood of the Christian flagship; so hotly were they pursued that they ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... ability myself gave the worst part of it to Nasmith, the Vice-Consul-General. Modifications became necessary every few minutes, and Leval and I were running around like stricken deer all day, seeing the disheartening number of government officials who were concerned, having changes made and asking for additional trains. During the afternoon more and more Germans came pouring into the Consulate for refuge, until there were over two thousand of them there, ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... they would be all very well if—if they were not British subjects. But such being the case, you never know! It is disheartening to find such babble in the mouth ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... preserved in their literature, which made them what they were, and which determined their value to future generations. Our democracy, the boast of all English-speaking nations, is a dream; not the doubtful and sometimes disheartening spectacle presented in our legislative halls, but the lovely and immortal ideal of a free and equal manhood, preserved as a most precious heritage in every great literature from the Greeks to the Anglo-Saxons. All our arts, our sciences, even our inventions are founded squarely ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... The disheartening part of it was that he needed about a dozen more men than he had; for the rock wall which was the rim of the Frying-pan seemed alive with shooters who waited only for a fair target. Then the Native Son, crouched down between a rock and a clump of brush, turned his head ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... of Anti-Lebanon, we entered a wide, disheartening plain, bounded by an amphitheatre of dreary mountains. Our horses had had no water for twenty-four hours, and we had had no refreshment of any kind for twenty. After two hours of more hard riding I came to another range of mountains, from beyond which opened the view of Damascus, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... are breaking for your sake; to think of brother and sister, wife and child, while you are pacing up and down those dreary trenches, waiting for your turn of sickness, perhaps of death. It must be bitter and disheartening at times; you would not be men, if it was not. One minute, perhaps, you remember that those whom you have left at home, love you and pray for you; and that cheers you; then you remember that all England loves you, and ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley
... returning procession! For as the sun sinks to rest, sad-faced men seek some cover where they may lie down and rest their weary bones; where perchance they may sleep and regain some degree of passive courage that will enable them, at the first streak of morning light, to rise and begin again a disheartening round of tramp, tramp, searching for work that is everlastingly denied them. Hungry and footsore, their souls fainting within them, they seek the homes where wives and children await their return with patient but ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... on behalf of Ireland, noticed elsewhere. He gave an appalling picture of the state of the English poor, showing that, in Manchester alone, nearly thirty thousand workmen and labourers were out of employment, while the prospect of the augmentation of the unemployed there was disheartening. The grant for Ireland was especially opposed by two members of the house, who, while they sympathised beyond most other members with the political agitators of Ireland, looked upon her material condition without an equally warm interest, and regarded her rather from an English than ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... you delay one moment, you shall have cause to remember it." Such positive injunctions were not disregarded by me. I was of course ready at the time appointed, and after all the hurry, had the honour of breakfasting with my commander before departing; but the woful and disheartening accounts of the hardships and privations I was to suffer in the country to which I was to proceed, fairly spoiled my appetite. I was told that my only lodging was to be a tent, my only food Indian corn, when I could get it; and many other comforts ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... in the capitulation of Hamilcar, which, in a manner, determined the fate of Sicily, were so disheartening to the Carthaginians, that they were obliged to submit to a disadvantageous and dishonorable peace. Among other terms, it was stipulated that they should evacuate all the places they held in Sicily, and entirely quit that island; that they ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... room was really orderly to the superficial view, but where I stood I could see the small boy who deliberately made a hideous face at me each time my eyes met his, the two girls who talked with their backs turned, the squirms of a figure here and there. It seemed so disheartening a record of failure that I hesitated much to yield to the uproarious request for a third story, but finally I did begin again, on a very long story which for its own sake I wanted ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... a disheartening commencement of their journey back to the main river, and darkness fell upon a desolate and terribly depressed company, who passed the night of solitude and despair wondering what had happened at the anchorage where the brig ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... for its physical features. Of the text matter it is difficult to write without passion. No more disheartening work has been put on the market ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... of the Neo-Positivist, as to those of other professed solutions of insoluble mysteries, whose souls are bound up in the success of their sectarian propaganda, no doubt, it must be very disheartening if the "world," for whose assent and approbation they sue, stops its ears and turns its back upon them. But what does it signify to any one who does not happen to be a missionary of any sect, philosophical or religious, and who, if he were, would have no sermon to preach except from ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... commanding interests to drop his routine even for a day or so means a busy time catching up later on; and in the case of Jim, who had lost all told the better part of two weeks, the accumulation was almost disheartening, ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... Lord Reckage's ordinarily inscrutable countenance. Lately, he had been somewhat depressed by his encounter with refractory wills. His horse, his colleagues on the Bond of Association, his future bride, had showed themselves fatiguing, perhaps worthless, certainly disheartening and independent accessories to his life. Here, at last, was some one brilliant, stimulating, by no means self-seeking, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... the south-east, hoping at last to strike some of the inhabited townships; and the unvarying solidity of forest was well-nigh disheartening him, when he saw, after several miles' walking, the distinctly defined imprint of a man's foot on some clayey soil near a clump of chestnut trees. Yes, there could be no mistake: some person had passed not long ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... cried Delcasse, and smote the arm of his chair a heavy blow. "I do foresee such a struggle—I have never denied it; and for twenty years I have laboured to prepare for it. You can understand, then, what a blow it is to me—how terrible, how disheartening—to have all my calculations blasted by such accidents ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... rude to call me a thing; it is disheartening, when I believed I was looking my best," says Monica, laughing. Somehow Kit's ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... with us threw a momentary brightness over the scene, but after their departure every thing looked more gloomy and disheartening than before. The fort itself was a deep, dark, damp, gloomy-looking place, inclosed in high walls, where the sunlight rarely penetrated. If we ascended to the parapet, we saw nothing but uncouth State ...
— Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-'61 • Abner Doubleday
... girls, merry and lively, full of ready wit, and with bright eyes and pleasant voices, that might have cheered the heart of the veriest misanthrope. But there are moments in one's life when the mind and spirits seem oppressed by a sort of dead dull calm, as enervating and disheartening as that which succeeds a West Indian hurricane in the month of August. At those times every thing loses its interest, and one appears to become as helpless as the ship that lies becalmed and motionless on the glassy surface ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... father it, and to present it to the counties at their general muster. This will be in time for our Assembly. The presentment going in the public papers just at the moment when Congress was together, produced a great effect both on its friends and foes in that body, very much to the disheartening and mortification of the latter. I wish this petition, if approved, to arrive there under the same circumstances, to produce the counter effect so wanting for their gratification. I could have wished to receive it from you again at our court on Monday, because ——— and ——— will be there, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... order to earn money enough to defray my expenses for the year 1902-03. I began work as soon as I reached home and labored on father's farm until the last week in June, 1902. I had seen by that time that there was nothing to be realized from that source but disheartening failure. ...
— The Sylvan Cabin - A Centenary Ode on the Birth of Lincoln and Other Verse • Edward Smyth Jones
... and a smile broke from under the shaggy yellow bang and another where the hand remained in a stationary receptive cup, or sometimes caressed the limp ends of the mustache in a way most discouraging and disheartening to the delinquent debtor. When Doc Macnooder arrived, however, he paid him the further honor to carefully close the glass cases where eclair and fruit cake were waiting the call to service, and braced himself against ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... disheartening enough at best, was made worse for the Nabob by the calumnious stones, whispered at first, now printed and put in circulation by thousands of copies, which resulted in his being tacitly quarantined by his ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... had passed since his wife's death, Mr. Day's experiences with domestic help had been disheartening as ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... eleven men killed and twenty-one wounded, of whom two subsequently died. This loss touched us deeply, yet it was encouraging to notice that it had not the effect of disheartening a single ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... letters that told his mother and sister and brother-in-law of his failure and distress; and when Eve, Mme. Chardon, and David each secretly sent money to their poet, it must be plain to the reader that the three hundred francs they sent were like their very blood. The overwhelming news, the disheartening sense that work as bravely as she might, she made so little, left Eve looking forward with a certain dread to an event which fills the cup of happiness to the full. The time was coming very near now, and to herself she said, "If my dear David has not reached the ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... performance, which left me in a condition of mental aberration, he sounded again, to begin a persistent, dragging pull which was the most disheartening of all his maneuvers; for he took yard after yard of line until he was far away from me, out in the Panuco. We followed him, and for an hour crossed to and fro, up and down, humoring him, responding to his every caprice, as ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... about the nature of the fortune he was handing over to her. Then his harsh tone had been due to a sense of futility in having been at great pains to preserve for this foolishly dressed and apparently empty-headed young woman a very great property. To him had come then acutely the disheartening realization of the underlying irony of life, when such power and privilege could be put into such futile hands. And he—the conscientious judge—had been the instrument of the law in perpetrating this bitter jest upon justice. But now he felt that Adelle might justify her good fortune. For ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... loved Miss Presby, and then the blows that had been rained on him and the mine, the failure of the green lead to hold out when it had at least promised and justified operation—all cumulated into a disheartening climax which was testing his fortitude as it had never been tried before. He was not of those who lack either persistence, determination, or moral bravery; and it was this last characteristic, coupled with a certain maturing caution, ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... as the Lamb Fair at Lockerbie, and for the first time in my life took a "fee" for the harvest. On arriving at the field when shearing and mowing began, the farmer asked me to bind a sheaf; when I had done so, he seized it by the band, and it fell to pieces! Instead of disheartening me, however, he gave me a careful lesson how to bind; and the second that I bound did not collapse when shaken, and the third he pitched across the field, and on finding that it still remained firm, he cried ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... cold-blooded, project of the officer for the recapture of the fugitives, still rang in her ears, and stimulated her to go on; but the solitude into which she must venture, the time, the actual danger of the ascent, and the uncertainty of her finding the hut, or what was still more disheartening, the chance that it might be occupied by unknown tenants, and those of the worst description—urged ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... is rather disheartening to have to address double ranks of umbrellas,' said Aunt Jane. 'Is the ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... The disheartening effect throughout the Confederacy may be guessed by the following extract from a diary kept by Mr. I. D. Jones, the Rebel ...
— History of the Second Massachusetts Regiment of Infantry: Beverly Ford. • Daniel Oakey
... perspective was similarly complicated. There were three pictures on each wall—nine in all; three of these were pictures of ships, three were pictures of battles: two portrayed saintly but emaciated personages sitting in peculiarly disheartening wildernesses (each wilderness contained one cactus plant and a camel). One of these personages stared fixedly at a skull, the other personage looked with intense firmness away from a lady of scant charms in a white and all too ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... Two dreary and disheartening years followed this tragic event, years in which the young poet found no present help, nor future hope. But over in Indianapolis, twenty miles away, happier circumstances were shaping themselves. Judge E. B. Martindale, ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... was disheartening work. His position indeed became difficult, and it needed all his tenacity to enable him to endure it. The difficulty became very evident one afternoon early in August, and the afternoon was, moveover, remarkable in that Garratt Skinner was betrayed ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... youth of to-day how much of their reputations was due to downright hard digging and plodding, what an uplift of inspiration and encouragement they would give! How often I have wished that the discouraged, struggling youth could know of the heartaches, the headaches, the nerve-aches, the disheartening trials, the discouraged hours, the fears and despair involved in works which have gained the admiration of the world, but which have taxed the utmost powers of their authors. You can read in a few minutes or a few hours a poem or a book ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... fulfil his good intention for want of time, didn't he, Owen? And there was an excuse for his past, though he never would claim it. I never forget that original disheartening blow, and how that from it sprang all the ills of his life—everything connected with his gloom, and the lassitude in business we used so often ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... it, he evolved some logic. Brian, leaving the wood by the river, would not go back the way he had come. He would travel upstream and mail his letter when he found the village. Kenny conversely had found the village first. Therefore he must travel downstream to find the wood; downstream through a disheartening tangle of bush and tree and brier and maybe snakes ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... But beside any disheartening influences which might affect the timid or the despondent, there were reasons enough of settled gravity against any over-confidence of hope. A war—which, whether we consider the expanse of the territory at stake, the hosts brought ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... to cross the river, to continue the search for Somerset in advance, and their scanty provision of flour being nearly exhausted, Frank Jardine, reluctantly abandoning the idea of getting into the Settlement, determined to return to the cattle, and with them, head the supposed bend of the Escape. Disheartening as this was, there was nothing else to be done in the present state of the country. Distance ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... "of African descent" to "tear off the corner!" Probably never before in the history of the United States has a portion of the citizens been so openly and crassly discriminated against by action of the general government. It was disheartening, and on top of it came the celebrated "German plots." It was alleged in various parts of the country with singular unanimity that Germans were working among the Negroes, and it was further intimated that this would make the Negroes too dangerous an element to trust with guns. To us, of course, ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... disheartening revelation to the king. Not that he was unwilling to sacrifice a subject, but that he was hopeless of finding a man willing to sacrifice himself. No time could be lost, however; for the princess was lying ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... Tunnel: Mr. Tyson told us that the difficulty of restoring it to a safe condition was so great as almost to dishearten him till he had arched it completely over from one end to the other with solid stone masonry, which has rendered the recurrence of the accident impossible; but the disheartening circumstance, while the work was in progress, was the danger to which the men employed in the work were exposed, from the constant falling in of the roof. During its progress no less than forty-five men were killed, and about 400 severely wounded. They were ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... The straw-hatted proprietor came and went, bearing beefsteak hammered flat to make it tender. The girl seemed the one happy person among us; for supper was going forward with the invariable alkali etiquette, all faces brooding and feeding amid a disheartening silence as of guilt or bereavement that springs from I have never been quite sure what—perhaps reversion to the native animal absorbed in his meat, perhaps a little from every guest's uneasiness lest he drink his coffee wrong or stumble ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... cannot, he dare not be dead!" sobbed Mercedes. "The news which Beauchamp acquainted me with was disheartening enough. My poor son, captain in the first Zouave regiment, or the so-called Jackals, about three months ago, after an expedition against the Kabyles, disappeared; they fear the wild ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... The prospect was disheartening enough. The river had narrowed to less than a hundred yards in width and wound and twisted amongst the waste of marsh that stretched desolately ahead and astern as far as the eye could see. To the east and west the marsh extended back at least a mile before it met solid timbered ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... itself is the source. If temper is born of a natural brusqueness, or of a restless, envious, unjust disposition, I am the first one to say that such a woman will become hateful, she will be the cause of disheartening quarrels. A connection of the heart becomes then a veritable torment, from which it is desirable to free oneself as ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... intact. I remember asking many of the officers attached to the forces which, after the Battle of Charleroi, retreated under a broiling sun, along roads burning with heat, through a suffocating dust, how they felt at this disheartening time. All of them answered, "We did not know where we were going or what we were doing, but we did know one thing—that we would beat them!" One writer, Pierre Laserre, described this retreat in the words, "Their bodies were retreating, but not their souls!" This ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... destroyed. He is shut out from his fellows. As they approach he must cry, 'Unclean! unclean!' that all humanity may be warned from his precincts. He must abandon wife and child. He must go to live with other lepers, in disheartening view of miseries similar to his own. He must dwell in dismantled houses or in the tombs. He is, as Trench says, a dreadful parable of death. By the laws of Moses (Lev. 13:45; Numb. 6:9; Ezek. 24:17) he was compelled, as if ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... pieces by an outbreak of revolution, though of course nobody said so. But I lived mainly (though not entirely) among the bien pensants people, who looked on all anti-governmental manifestations with horror. Perhaps the restless discontent which destroyed Louis Philippe's government is the most disheartening circumstance in the whole course of recent French history. That the rule of Charles Dix should have occasioned revolt may be regrettable, but is not a matter for surprise. But that of Louis Philippe was not a stagnant or retrogressive regime. "La carriere" was very undeniably ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... filled with the washing of the waves and the roars of the gusts. The blasts now descended to the surface of the lake, and now went whirling and swelling upward, in a way to lead the listener to fancy that the viewless winds might, for once, be seen. For a single painful instant, in one of those disheartening moments of despair that will come over the stoutest, his hand was about to relinquish its hold of the baron, and to make the last natural struggle for life; but that fair and modest picture of maiden loveliness and truth, which had so long haunted his waking ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... moment, though they perceived a heap of mangled corpses swept before them with fearful rapidity. Aguilar could not behold unmoved the destruction wrought amongst his brave followers; and fearing that a second discharge of those terrible missiles might succeed in disheartening them, in ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... was the financial burden, and so vexatious and disheartening the bickering and ingratitude, that Penn thought seriously of selling his governorship; and it was in the market for several years awaiting a purchaser. Indeed, in 1712, he had so far perfected a bargain to transfer his proprietary rights ...
— William Penn • George Hodges
... used to say, as he returned a prose entirely besmirched with blue pencil, "I believe you really try, but the result is most disheartening." ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... observers of it, had been struck small. To their own minds they seemed like little black insects crawling painfully. In the distance these insects crawled was a disproportion to the energy expended, a disproportion disheartening, filling the soul with the despair of an accomplishment that could mean anything in the following of that which made ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... and those ridiculous mottoes, which could hardly amuse anyone out of Earlswood Asylum, were looked at a shade more contemptuously than usual. The weather was too warm for enthusiasm. And Violet's pale set face was almost as disheartening as the skeleton at an Egyptian banquet. When Mrs. Tempest retired to put on her travelling-dress Violet went with her, a filial attention the mother had in ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... breakers were ahead in the accomplishment of the work before us; for the timid ones this very ignorance proved a great blessing,—conquering one difficulty at a time, with the greater ones in the shadow, was not as disheartening as having the future ...
— Silver Links • Various
... condemned; there was no El Dorado anywhere; and till one could emigrate to the moon, it seemed as well to stay patiently at home. Nor was there wanting another sign, at once more picturesque and more disheartening; for, as we continued to steam westward towards the land of gold, we were continually passing other emigrant trains upon the journey east; and these were as crowded as our own. Had all these return voyagers made a fortune in the mines? Were they all bound for Paris, and to be in Rome by Easter? ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which no precaution will certainly avert; and failing in the support which was supposed sure, defeat ensued. But these reverses were not without their uses, as subsequent events clearly demonstrated. Accepting the conditions, which were most disheartening, Mr. David and his partner addressed themselves to the work of securing their creditors and restoring their fortunes. It was a long and weary struggle, demanding persistent application, economy, and careful management. They were subjected to painful imputations ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... return to office of the Tories; ignorant as we were how much wiser than his party the statesman then at the head of it was, or how greatly what we all most desired would be advanced by the very success that had been most disheartening. There will be no harm now in giving one of these pieces, which will sufficiently show the tone of all of them, and with what a hearty relish they were written. I doubt indeed if he ever enjoyed anything more than the power of thus taking part occasionally, unknown to outsiders, in ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... Pole. Heavy rains prevailed, and the ice over which they were travelling so laboriously towards the north, was itself drifting more rapidly to the south than the distances which they could accomplish. Thus, the last three days having been spent in this disheartening and fruitless toil,—half the provisions being exhausted,—some of the men falling sick, and being reported unfit for exertion,—the scurvy threatening them,—and no hope of any favourable change remaining—our brave countrymen were compelled to abandon their impracticable design. They accordingly ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 278, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various
... die from one moment to another. Just think, the poor little chap for the last three days has had nothing in his stomach. It is useless for Jenkins to talk. You cannot improve children like snails by making them go hungry. It is disheartening all the same not to be able to save one of them. The infirmary is full. It is really a wretched ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... as all this work was, it was but the smallest part of his work. Richelieu found that his officers were cheating his soldiers in their pay and disheartening them; in face of the enemy he had to reorganize the army and to create a new military system. He made the army twice as effective and supported it at two-thirds less cost than before. It was his boast in his "Testament," that, from a mob, the army became "like a well-ordered ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... It was a disheartening beginning. But as the hours slipped by they had better success. One horse, two, three could be towed on separate ropes behind the raft. And in the morning there was a cockleshell of a boat oared in by one of the men who ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... beginning of our voyage, and at its close had been almost taken by an English squadron. Under these circumstances, how rapturously we inhaled the balmy, air of Provence! Such was our joy, that we were scarcely sensible of the disheartening news which arrived from all quarters. At the first moment of our arrival, by a spontaneous impulse, we all repeated, with tears in our eyes, the beautiful lines which Voltaire has put into the mouth of the ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... raise the self-respect of the lower classes. But the effect of such laws must be slow and gradual; and the error which has most contributed to that delay in the progress of freedom, which is 'so disheartening to every liberal mind,'[272] is the confusion as to the true causes of misery. Thus, as he has already urged, professed economists could still believe, so long after the publication of Adam Smith's work, that it was 'in the power of the justices ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... impulse of a lively gale, will tear itself loose from the aggregated avoirdupois of all who can lay hands upon it, and wrench great branches from the forest giants over which it skims. Doubtless, to the disheartening influence of a practical knowledge of the real difficulties in the way of aerial navigation is due the fact that the great mass of those who have attempted it have been scientists without practice, or fools without either scientific training or ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... expressed by the books on her table. These volumes, frequently renewed, and almost always damp from the press, bore names generally unfamiliar to Mrs. Leveret, and giving her, as she furtively scanned them, a disheartening glimpse of new fields of knowledge to be breathlessly traversed in Mrs. Ballinger's wake. But to-day a number of maturer-looking volumes were adroitly mingled with the primeurs of the press—Karl Marx jostled Professor ...
— Xingu - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... ahead proved quite un-negotiable, so at 8.30 p.m. last night, to the intense disappointment of all, instead of forging ahead, we had to retire half a mile so as to get on a stronger floe, and by 10 p.m. we had camped and all hands turned in again. The extra sleep was much needed, however disheartening the ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... insincerity. When they appealed to him for an opinion of some phase of the subject, he answered with caution. He tried to turn the talk to his experiences on the Shonkin range, and found the wild man cropping up with disheartening persistency. He shifted often in the saddle, because of the deep sunburns which smarted continually and maddeningly. He wondered if the boys had used all of that big box of carbolic salve which used to be kept in a corner of the mess-box; and was carbolic salve good for sun-blisters? He told ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... de Benavides resigns his bishopric (July 4), to become archbishop of Manila. On the next day he reports to the king his arrival at Manila, and the present condition of affairs in the islands, which is very disheartening. The Mindanao pirates have ravaged the coasts, and carried away many captives. The richest part of the city, including the merchandise stored in the warehouses, has been destroyed by fire; and the ships from Mexico arrived too late for the merchants to ship goods ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... La Salle. If the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf of Mexico, a new and boundless Indian trade lay open to Frenchmen. But did it flow into the Gulf? That was a question La Salle proposed to settle; but three heroic attempts were made, and two failures, which to other men would have been disheartening, were endured, before he passed down the river to its mouth in ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... with them steers developing speed every day till they got too fast for any one but the old lady. Brother and sister would be left far behind, or mebbe get stacked up and discouraged or sprained for the day. The old dame said it was disheartening, indeed, trying to make companions of one's children when they showed such a low order of intelligence for it. Still, she was fair-minded; so she had a golf links made, and put 'em at that. She wouldn't play herself, saying it was an ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... when the child reads his first book. An encouraging sign for the future is the care that is now taken in all good libraries to supervise the reading of children and to provide for them special quarters and facilities. A somewhat disheartening circumstance, on the other hand, is the multiplication of annotated and abbreviated children's editions of all sorts of works that were read by the last generation of children without any such treatment. This kind of boned chicken may be very well for the mental ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... disheartening spectacle of all was in the morning when the bugle sounded for the assembly of the regiment; for only about six women to a company of a hundred men being allowed to go with us, many who were married had to leave wives and children behind, with the thought that it might never be their lot ...
— The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence - A Hero of the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns • William Lawrence
... diet, without any other food, will bid fairest to cure a hemiplegia or even a dead palsy, and consequently all the lesser degrees of a partial one, if entered upon before fifty. And this distemper I take to be the most obstinate, intractable, and disheartening one that can afflict the human machine; and is chiefly produced by intemperate cookery, with its ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... It was a disheartening discovery, but the three Rover boys did not stop to think it over. Throwing open the bolted door, Tom and Dick joined Sam, and in the darkness made their way to the rear of the room in which they had held Cuffer ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)
... that no great change has come over Miss Rachel Harding, during the years that have intervened. She takes the same disheartening view of human nature and the world's prospects as ever. Nevertheless, her own hold upon the world seems as strong as ever. Her appetite continues remarkably good, and, although she frequently expresses herself to the effect that there is little use in living, she would be as unwilling ...
— Jack's Ward • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... Mr. Reed with disheartening enthusiasm as Wallie placed the biscuit, butter, and molasses before him ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... Confederate loan had been floated in Europe by Baron Erlanger, also a Frankfort financial magnate, and by birth a Hebrew. In the conversation that ensued between this lady and Baron Rothschild, the latter said: "Madam, my sympathies are entirely with your country; but is it not disheartening to think that there are men in Europe who are lending their money and trying to induce others to lend it for the strengthening of human slavery? Madam, NONE BUT A CONVERTED JEW WOULD ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... a very strong sense of the necessity of having some kind of "help" soon. Mrs. Rossitur wearied herself excessively with doing very little, and then looked so sad to see Fleda working on, that it was more disheartening and harder to bear than the fatigue. Hugh was a most faithful and invaluable coadjutor, and his lack of strength was, like her own, made up by energy of will; but neither of them could bear the strain long; and when the final clearing away of the dinner-dishes gave her a breathing- ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... hemmed in, shut up, incarcerated in stubborn circumstance, from a long reaching range of duties, calling aloud upon his conscience and heart to hasten with the first, that he might reach the second. What rendered it the more disheartening was, that, having discovered, as he hoped, how to compass his first end, the whole possibility had by his sister's behaviour, and the consequent disappearance of Lenorme, been swept from him, leaving ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... demons to the tune. In gray-brown desolation the sand dunes rolled away to the foothills, far and violet and dim. All was cold and bleak and forbidding, and the sun itself appeared to be retiring eagerly from a scene so dreary and disheartening. ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... you very much," she faltered; and then, with disheartening hastiness, "Of course, I like you very much; but I am not in ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... Kop. All looked lurid and desolate, and at times the cannonading was terrific, the Boer 6" with its black powder vomiting smoke and affording an excellent mark. At 4 p.m. the Engineer balloon went up in our rear to reconnoitre, and brought down a disheartening report of unmasked Boer guns and positions which would enfilade our advance from here all the way to Ladysmith; so that after a Council of War the Commander-in-Chief decided to retire the troops; my orders from Colonel Parsons, R.A., being to make preparations to ...
— With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) - Journal of Active Service • Charles Richard Newdigate Burne
... said he, his voice tremulous with feeling, "isn't this disheartening? What are ...
— True Riches - Or, Wealth Without Wings • T.S. Arthur
... conviction was mutual and profound. The cow was not only gone, but she had shown such disinclination to be domesticated, and such a misapprehension of the true purpose of life, that the prospect was truly disheartening. ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... with success? It could not be otherwise! No other consideration could have induced the barbarian general to abandon such an achievement as the destruction of Rome. With the chance of an assault the prospects of Paganism had brightened—with the certainty of a blockade, they sunk immediately into disheartening gloom! ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... were not the smallest signs of lawless folk, not even a gibbet with a skeleton hanging in chains to show where lawless folk had been. He sought high and low, but he never saw a living soul besides a few shepherds clothed in skins. It was most disheartening! Once he saw two men crouching behind a rock, and approached them; but as soon as they saw him they ran away, and although he followed them, shouting that they were not to be afraid since he wanted to be a brigand too, they paid no attention, but only ran the faster, and at last he had to ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... and long-suffering mood this morning. Actions for which O'Hara would on other days have been expelled from the room without hope of return, today were greeted with a mild "Don't do that, please, O'Hara," or even the ridiculously inadequate "O'Hara!" It was perfectly disheartening. O'Hara began to ask himself bitterly what was the use of ragging at all if this was how it was received. And the moments were flying, and his promise to Renford ...
— The Gold Bat • P. G. Wodehouse
... was very disheartening to Kettle but seemed of great interest to Sergeant Halligan and his side partner, Sergeant Gully, and also to the orderly, who grinned sympathetically with ...
— Betty at Fort Blizzard • Molly Elliot Seawell
... direction which Bertram had taken on extricating himself from the poor mad woman,—a direction which he was unwilling to change from his fear of again falling in with her,—brought him into direct opposition to it. To these disheartening and bewildering circumstances of his present situation were added those of previous exhaustion, cold, hunger, and anxiety in regard to the probable construction of the share he had borne, as a passive spectator, in the events of the day; having, however unintentionally, become a party in the eye ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... as the only other likely weak place, but on climbing up and again testing the mortar with the point of his knife, the result was disheartening, for the cement of the good old times hardened into something far more difficult to deal with than stone. In fact, he soon found that he would be more likely to escape by sawing through the bars or ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... the boy, travelled on foot, sometimes singing as they marched. So they began the long and terrible journey, the later horrors of which I dare not give in the words here set down. The first weeks were painful and disheartening, although they still had food. Their chief discomfort arose from the extreme cold at night and the tortures from the sand-flies and mosquitoes on their exposed bodies, which they tried to remedy by covering themselves with sand, but ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... damps, and at once communicates them to the spirits. Hope forsakes us. We are weary, exhausted. Our energy is dispirited. Sleep does "not weigh our eyelids down." We stare upon the vacancy. We conjure up a thousand restless, disheartening images. We abandon projects we have formed, and which, viewed through this medium, appear fantastical, chimerical, absurd. We ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... heart: My thinned ranks told the woeful tale of the fierce struggles, indescribable by words, through which my division had passed since 7 o'clock in the morning; and this, added to our hungry and exhausted condition, was naturally disheartening. The men had been made veterans, however, by the fortunes and misfortunes of the day, and as they went into their new places still confident of final success, it was plain to see that they felt a self-confidence inspired by the part ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... diphtheria has recently made its appearance in the Shenandoah Valley and is now invading our immediate neighborhood. Four of Andrew Crist's children are now dangerously ill with the disease. Some in other families have died; and others are sick. The outlook, both as to health and peace, is very disheartening. But we are admonished in the Divine Word not to fear. The people of God have a better portion than this world can give—"an enduring substance, which death ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... like a huge child's box of wooden bricks waiting to be arranged into some intelligible pattern. Of course, this is not London proper. Were the Great Wheel set up in Trafalgar Square, one is fain to hope that the view from it would be less disheartening—though it might be better ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... Since the disheartening crash came, he has given to the public a third Mississippi River tale, 'Pudd'nhead Wilson,' issued in 1894; and a third historical novel, 'Joan of Arc,' a reverent and sympathetic study of the bravest ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... through which they passed was mountainous and muddy. If the column had been captured so soon after the Paardeberg disaster, the relief of Kimberley and the relief of Ladysmith, it might have been so disheartening to the remaining Boer commandos that the war might have been ended at that time. It was a magnificent retreat and well worthy to be placed in the Boer's scroll of honour with Cronje's noble stand at Paardeberg, ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... disheartening task of reviewing an array of bloodless "-ologies," let us put the question to ourselves thus: Be it supposed that a young man or woman who wants to take a course, of at least a year's length, in the elements of anthropology, joins some university which is thoroughly in touch with the scientific ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... extent unconscious of the extreme gravity of the situation which developed during the Great War, when the Germans were sinking an increasing volume of merchant tonnage week by week. The people of this country as a whole rose superior to many disheartening events and never lost their sure belief in final victory, but full knowledge of the supreme crisis in our history might have tended to undermine in some quarters that confidence in victory which it ...
— The Crisis of the Naval War • John Rushworth Jellicoe
... Street, with a sign proclaiming that I was attorney-at- law and Avokat. During six months I had two clients and made exactly three pounds. Then, the house being wanted, I left and gave up law. This was a very disheartening time for me. I had a great many friends who could easily have put collecting and other business in my hands, but none of them did it. I felt this very keenly. Quite apart from a young man's pushing himself, despite every obstacle, ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... The scene was so disheartening that Cyril did not leave the house again for another fortnight. His first visit was to Mr. Wallace. The sight of a watchman at the door gave him quite a shock, and he was grieved indeed when he heard from the man that the ...
— When London Burned • G. A. Henty
... though he achieved naturalism of matter, he clung to the theatrical artificiality of style which was in vogue. But if he had broken away from all traditions, he could have gained no hearing whatever; he died young—twenty years more might have left him a much greater figure; and he wrought in disheartening loneliness of spirit. His accomplishment was that of a pioneer. He was the first American author to see that the true field for his fellows was America and not Europe. He realized, as the genius of Chateaubriand realized ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... afraid," said a gentleman of this kind to the Easy Chair, "that my party is falling into bad hands. I see signs of corruption which seem to me very disheartening." He shook his head forebodingly. This gentleman did not conceal his opinion. He announced it freely, and the rumor came to the ears of the real managers of the party. They put their heads together, and presently ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... It was rather disheartening to approach the extremity of the island, and upon entering a long narrow valley our guide assured us that although no apparent exit existed, we should ascend a precipitous path and immediately see the point of Cape St. Andrea. The valley narrowed to a point without any visible path. A ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... One most disheartening circumstance appeared, viz. that when he made the circuit oval his law of equable description of areas broke down. That seemed to require the circular orbit, and yet no circular orbit ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... depressing landscape to the rich beauties of the Sind Valley and Kashmir. But to make the journey the other way round, and to pass into the gloomy region after being spoilt by the luxuries of Kashmir, is sadly disheartening ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... Ishmaels—"their hands against every man and every man's hand against them,"—and though the pleasant summer weather brought many sunshiny days and starlit nights, the cold, damp, and dismal days took all the poetry out of this roving life, and sodden forests and relentless foes brought dreary and disheartening hours. Trust me, boys, this so-called "free and jolly life of the bold outlaw," which so many story-papers picture, whether it be with Brian Boru in distant Ireland, nine hundred years ago, or in Sherwood Forest with Robin Hood, or with ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... had made me add to my letter; the incomprehensible withdrawal from the employment in which she was prospering; the disheartening difficulties which had brought her to the brink of starvation; the degrading return to the man who had cruelly deceived her—all was explained, all was excused now! With an infant at the breast, how ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... burned through her deep tan, but her low, clear voice did not falter and her eyes held his unflinchingly. "I know you better than you know yourself, as I've said before. You are killing yourself, but it isn't the work, frightfully hard and disheartening as it is, that is doing it—it's your anxiety for me and the uncertainty of everything. You haven't been able to rest because you have been raging and fuming so at unavoidable conditions—you have been fighting facts. And it's all so useless, Steve, between ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... spoken through him. And so here goes! up with the Ark and the trumpets, and out on to the hot sand for the march! It would have been a great deal easier to have stopped in the tents. It was disheartening work marching round thus. The sceptical spirit in the host—the folk of whom there are many great-grandchildren living to-day, who always have objections to urge when disagreeable duties are crammed ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... disheartening, and made Sam feel sober. But he brightened up at the thought that he should be in the same city, and should, therefore, have some chance of ...
— Sam's Chance - And How He Improved It • Horatio Alger
... destitute, and exposed to hardships and privations of every kind, there were only three suicides in two months. The decrease, therefore, in the suicide rate was more than 97 per cent. This surprising result of a disheartening and depressing calamity was due partly to the excitement of life under new and extraordinary conditions, and partly to the feeling, which every man had, that he was enduring and working with a host of sympathetic comrades, and not suffering and striving alone. If life were always vividly interesting, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... every trinket and superfluity (and of necessaries too, I feared, when I remembered the slender baggage that came up with them from the boat) that they had procured the means of travelling, in the cheapest and most humble manner, and with the disheartening certainty of arriving penniless at Vienna. Van Haubitz told me all this, and many other details, with an air of gloomy despondency. He was hopeless, heart-broken, desperate; and certain circumstances of his position, which by some would have been held an alleviation, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... the Rhine frontier; but even there, there was ample room for anxiety. On the whole, the grand attitude in which Buonaparte had left the Republic when he embarked for Egypt, was exchanged for one of a far humbler description; and, in fact, as has been intimated, the general disheartening of the nation, by reason of those reverses, had been of signal service to Napoleon's ambition. If a strong hand was wanted at home, the necessity of having a general who could bring back victory to the tricolor banners in the field had been not less ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... after brigade," says General Porter, "seemed almost to melt away before the concentrated fire of our artillery and infantry; yet others pressed on, followed by supports daring and brave as their predecessors, despite their heavy losses and the disheartening effect of having to clamber over many of their disabled and dead, and to meet their surviving comrades rushing back in great disorder from the deadly contest."* (* Battles and Leaders of the Civil War volume 2 page 337.) For over an hour Hill fought on without support. ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... baseball must know the rules thoroughly to be a success. It is in this way that advantage of every fair opportunity can be taken. Nothing is so disheartening to a team as to lose a closely contested game ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... o'clock in the morning Sir Moses received a letter from Monsieur Cremieux, informing him that he had started for Cairo. Sir Moses, who felt himself in duty bound not to quit his post for fear of injuring his cause, determined, notwithstanding the disheartening state of politics, to go to the Pasha and ask for an answer to the petition that he had presented on the day after ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... disheartening to slave day after day as you do," went on Mrs. Wilders to Mr. Faulks, "and ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... I approached my native city, the more I recalled to myself doubtingly the circumstances, prospects, and hopes with which I had left home; and it was with a very disheartening feeling that I now returned, as it were, like one shipwrecked. Yet, since I had not very much with which to reproach myself, I contrived to compose myself tolerably well: however, the welcome was not without emotion. The great vivacity of my ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... "you're absolutely right. I've been a failure, Elizabeth—a rank, disheartening failure. You'd be foolish to trust the result of your life labors in my hands—entirely foolish. I admit that it's a shrewd blow to see ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... to friends. Helen gave the permission by a silent bend of the head. The letters, however, were but short and freezing answers from what appeared to be distant connections or former friends, or persons to whom the deceased had applied for some situation. They were all very disheartening in their tone. Leonard next endeavoured to refresh Helen's memory as to the name of the nobleman which had been last on her father's lips; but there he failed wholly. For it may be remembered that Lord L'Estrange, when he pressed ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that she would ever become the wise, helpful woman that she had once warmly desired to see herself. Her own defects were now familiar and sorely disheartening to her, and she had grown aware that she could not by inspiration set and preserve in smooth, swift motion the various wheels of Otter, not even if—unlooked for and undesired sequel!—she received express permission to dance upon the ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... broached the subject declared it to be impossible, prophesying that the extension of the settlement westward would forever be obstructed by their unscalable heights. Blaxland, however, was not intimidated by these disheartening predictions; and, in 1811, he started out on a short journey of investigation, in company with three Europeans and two natives. On this trip he found that by keeping on the crowning ridge or dividing water-shed between the streams running into the Nepean and those that fed what he then ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc |
